Peace in our time watch: Rumble off Cyprus

The good news is that so far, everyone is containing himself in the Eastern Mediterranean, at least in terms of actual confrontation or shooting.

The rest of the story can be summarized as follows. On 19 September, Houston-based Noble Energy “spudded” an exploration well with its Noble Homer Ferrington drilling rig in the “Aphrodite” oil-and-gas field off Cyprus’ southern coast (you can’t make this stuff up).

The Turks got their seismic exploration vessel, the K. Piri Reis, underway, and dispatched three naval ships for escort. Piri Reis has reached her operating area and begun exploration. The three-ship task force doesn’t have as much firepower as it might: it is reportedly composed of one frigate – the actual warship – a training ship, and an ocean tug.

That said, the Turks issued a NOTAM for a maritime exercise in the vicinity of the drilling area last week, within a day of the Noble rig’s arrival. According to Greek sources, the NOTAM was rejected, but the Turks conducted a naval exercise there anyway, with warships and fighter jets. The Greeks emitted a rhetorical high-five because the Turks didn’t approach the Noble drilling rig any closer than 50 nautical miles during this event.

Greek sources are now reporting – because it’s important to keep the fire stoked, I suppose – that Israel has requested authorization for the IAF to use the airfield on the island of Paphos, in exchange for “ensuring the air defense of the Republic and changing the military balance in the region.” The quid is believable here; the quo is not. Israel might well seek an agreement with Cyprus to use the Paphos air base, but deploying the IAF to patrol Cypriot air space is something Israel would save for a later decision point, presumably if Turkey escalated maritime tensions.

It would be a mistake to think Turkey is weak and is acting silly. For Turkey, the drilling off Cyprus (and the Turkish exploration) is, in part, a pretext for keeping warships on patrol in the Eastern Med. The warships are not going to pack up and go home any time soon. Turkey has already announced a more active naval posture, and Erdogan will make good on that. Look for Turkish warships to start patrolling further and further abroad. Having ships in place to “escort flotillas” heading for the Gazan coast is likely to be a matter of warships already on-scene for “routine” patrols. Turkey is changing her baseline naval posture, not merely responding ad hoc to random priorities.

The Turks are hardly driving out into a traffic jam: the naval stalwarts of NATO – the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands – don’t make it over to the Eastern Med nearly as much as they used to. Cash-strapped Greece has just announced a drawdown of participation in NATO naval operations because she really can’t even afford to patrol her own waters. The vacuum being left by an inattentive United States and a lackadaisical NATO is becoming apparent.

Who, incidentally, is coming to the rescue of Cyprus’ faltering financial situation? That would be Russia, of course, which continues to have an interest in beefing up ties with Greece and Cyprus – geopolitically “flanking” Turkey – and establishing stakes in both Mediterranean frontage and oil-and-gas deposits.

I am unconvinced that Russia has dispatched “two nuclear submarines” to patrol the Eastern Med; I consider it a better assessment that no more than one has been deployed to the Med, if any. A Russian nuclear attack submarine (SSN) would have to come from the Northern Fleet, in the Barents Sea, which has only 11 SSNs in the current order of battle. (There are no nuclear submarines in the Black or Baltic Sea.) No more than 6-7 of the Northern Fleet SSNs are in “constant-ready” status at a given time. I regard 5 as a better estimate. Assuming the 6-7, however, and assuming the Russians hope to keep their SSNs in service, they can’t generate more than 4-6 long-range patrols per year with the number they have operational.

The Russian submarine force is naturally the naval element whose patrol patterns we know the least about today, but the Russians were at pains to make clear the resumption of a global presence starting in 2007, and the operation of an SSN off the US East coast in 2009. A Mediterranean presence would be one among several priorities, and would be likely to result in about two total Med patrols per year (with about 45-50 days on-station), probably done as single patrols and spaced over time.

There may well be a Russian SSN in the Eastern Med right now, but I would be surprised if there’s more than one. Russian nuclear subs almost never make port visits, as US and other NATO subs do when on deployment. A Russian diesel-powered attack sub, a Kilo-class SS from the Baltic, participated visibly in a NATO submarine exercise off Spain’s southeastern coast this summer, and diesel-powered subs are more likely in general to make port calls. The older ones in service have to expose their masts to snorkel anyway, and require refueling during deployments; they can’t maintain stealth on long-range deployments as nuclear-powered submarines can.

So the Russians can make claims that may or may not be true about deploying nuclear submarines, as a means of influencing the political situation. It will be interesting to see if Russia lets the region glimpse, however briefly, a submarine that may be in the Eastern Med. The implied long-term outcome of the Russian push with Cyprus (and Greece), coupled with the announcement of the sub deployments, is Russian use of their ports. Making an SSN visible, even if only for half an hour, would reinforce that implication most effectively – especially assuming the SSN carries the SS-N-21 Sampson (RK-55 Granit), or “Tomahawkski,” land-attack missile.

Meanwhile, Russia will be reinforcing the general message about seapower and land influence in the Med with the deployment this fall of an amphibious landing ship to the Balkan Peninsula. Ropucha LST Tsesar Kunikov will deploy from the Black Sea in October and November to conduct port visits in Greece and Montenegro (a Serb region of former Yugoslavia, located on the Adriatic Sea, where the port of Tivat, long used by the Soviet Navy, is situated). The landing ship will participate in a ceremony on 20 October to commemorate the Battle of Navarino, a key confrontation of the year 1827 in the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. (The Russians were on the side that defeated the Ottoman fleet.)

Such commemorations of history are typical of Russian policy, and never more so than when they make a strong point with modern rivals – in the present case, Turkey. At this point, there is little reason to refer any longer to a Pax Americana. The linchpin of the Pax Americana, the NATO alliance, is precisely what is being undermined by the migration of NATO allies Turkey and Greece away from common strategic objectives. Russia – once the motivating factor for NATO – is now sought and cultivated by one ally out of concern about the other. All things old are new again, we’re not in Kansas anymore, and peace in our time has some tough innings ahead of it.

Responses

Serious and informative comment.
1. Noble should have that rig in the gulf.
2. The fact you know the order of battle of the Russian Northern Fleet is impressive and scary.
3. Russia as a counter weight to Turkey is interesting.
4. You are correct to point out “the more things change, the more they are the same. The old nationalistic tectonic plates remain.
5. I would be very careful about throwing out “incommode” here in Oklahoma. Transitive verbs remain a mystery in the out lying areas.

Who woulda thunk we’d be happy for Russian presence in the Med. Years ago I saw American sailors on a Greek island drunk as humanly possible yet well behaved. We created a vacuum by our absence, a big mistake.

Turkey is acting like Germany did in the 1930’s. Invading neighbors and being appeased (ahem Northern Cyprus)… and threatening further actions and militaristic behaviors / build up as well. A nationalist movement internally, based on fundamental Islamic doctrine, and it looks like a nut case has run wild. Erdogan praises Palestinians while abusing his local kurdish people in a similar plight. The BIG question is will the powers that be let it run wild, potentially erupting a major fiasco, or will they address the issue early while it is still easily containable.

I blame weak and vacillating Obama administration entirely for the Turkish invasion and partition of Cyprus back in the 1970s.

If this was a good Republican administration we would have nuked the Turks long ago – and the Russians too. That would have learned them……. Yes, a couple of carriers in the Eastern Med would certainly stop the Turkish Cypriots exploiting the resources off the coast of the Turkish part of Cyprus.

And the murder of Turkish and NAT0 citizens on the High Seas by foreign, non-NATO, pirates – and with apparant impunity – certainly had nothing to do with convincing the Turks that NATO (or the US as a reliable ally) mightn’t be worth a pitcher of warm spit.

And as for the Chinese. The ascendancy of China is nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that there are 1 billion of them, or that having junked communism, their economy, and the country itself, has become a global force. No, it is all down to weak, vacillating Obama. If a good patriotic Republican administration was in power we would be telling the Chinks to shrink their economy, to stop modernising their military – and hands off Africa and its resources – exploiting the Africans is our monopoly. Yup, a red-blooded Republican administration would surely have put a stop to the march of China. Somehow…

We need to immediately reduce the size of government and double the size of the military and double our nuclear force so that we can again kill everyone on the planet at least twice. Being able to kill them only once is encouraging the Russians to meddle in areas where we have a God-given right to a monopoly on meddling. And if the Ruskies had gotten a nuke or two through our missile shield – who cares? We can do without a million or two Americans. After all, 298 millions is plenty enough to run the country post the Bush economic crash.

[…] will be sending more warships to the Med after the Black Sea Fleet task force visits Greece and Montenegro later this month. The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov will reportedly leave the Barents in late November for a […]

[…] will be sending more warships to the Med after the Black Sea Fleet task force visits Greece and Montenegro later this month. The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov will reportedly leave the Barents in late November for a […]

[…] Posted by Matt in October 12th, 2011 The ante is being upped in the Eastern Mediterranean as the crisis south of Cyprus bubbles along. Turkish news outlet Today’s Zaman reports that on Monday, the Turkish government announced […]

[…] on either side of their EEZ line, following the agreement between them in December 2010. Turkey waded into the drilling area with warships in 2011, and has kept up a presence of naval patrols and air surveillance in the 18 months since, […]

[…] on either side of their EEZ line, following the agreement between them in December 2010. Turkey waded into the drilling area with warships in 2011, and has kept up a presence of naval patrols and air surveillance in the 18 months since, […]

[…] from international waters off Cyprus (in Cyprus’s EEZ) during the summer. Ankara has been loaded for bear on this issue since Cyprus delineated an EEZ boundary with Israel in 2010, and began soliciting bids for maritime […]

[…] from international waters off Cyprus (in Cyprus’s EEZ) during the summer. Ankara has been loaded for bear on this issue since Cyprus delineated an EEZ boundary with Israel in 2010, and began soliciting bids for maritime […]

[…] dispute with Cyprus, over EEZ boundaries as well as the status of “Northern Cyprus,” has heated up in the last three years with the exploitation of oil and gas reserves off Cyprus’s coast. (See […]

The House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee held a hearing last week on the impending crisis of the insolvency of the Social Security Disability... Read More The post Congress Holds Hearings on the Need for SSDI Reform appeared first on Daily Signal.

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in King v. Burwell, a challenge to Obamacare that could gut a core provision of the... Read More The post How Liberals Are Trying to Intimidate Roberts Court in King v. Burwell Case appeared first on Daily Signal.

The congressional showdown over President Obama’s immigration actions and Department of Homeland Security funding has officially ended. This afternoon the House voted 257-167 to pass... Read More The post House Approves Homeland Security Funding, Lets Obama’s Immigration Actions Stand appeared first on Daily Signal.

Part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s role today was as a representative of his region of the world. It tells you just how concerned those who deal with Iran are about the pending nuke deal that the Israeli leader was voicing–genuinely and accurately, by the way–the nervousness of not just Israel but Saudi Arabia, […] The post Bibi’s Speech Alr […]

Even his critics had to concede that Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a first-rate address to Congress—a masterpiece of persuasive oratory. While much of the attention rightly focused on what the prime minister had to say about the proposed nuclear accorded with Iran (“a very bad deal”), he also had an important message to deliver about Iran’s […] The post Givin […]

The inability of liberal writers and journalists to hide their intellectual laziness around conservative women has been a recurring theme of the modern political era. As the Obama administration’s “war on women” showed, the left tends to believe women are incapable of thinking independently. And as liberals showed with regard to Sarah Palin in 2008, […] The […]